, but
elsewhere, in order to act more strongly on the human emotions by the
effect of contrast. In describing the ugly it awakens desire for the
beautiful. Art should be spontaneous and exuberant with the truth of
conviction; it should be free from mannerism and all dogmatism,
intellectual or moral. The positive aesthetic sentiment, or sentiment
of beauty is very relative, and depends essentially on the
phylogenetic adaptation of the human sentiments, as well as on
individual habits and popular customs. The odor of manure is no doubt
pleasant to a farm laborer, but it is unpleasant to us. The male
invert finds man more beautiful than woman. A savage or a peasant
regards as beautiful what a cultured man considers ugly. The music of
Wagner or Chopin is tiresome to a person with no musical education or
ear, while a melomaniac goes into raptures over it.

=Erotic Art.=--It is quite natural that the chord whose vibrations
influence the most powerful human emotion--sexual love--has an
infinite variety of vibrations in all forms of art. Music gives
expression to the sexual sensations and their psychic irradiations by
tones representing desire, passion, joy, sadness, deception, despair,
sacrifice, ecstasy, etc.

In sculpture and painting it is love in all its shades which furnishes
the inexhaustible theme; but it is in the domain of literature that
love celebrates its triumphs, and often also its orgies. The novels
and dramas in which it plays no part could be easily counted. I am not
referring only to common novelettes, nor to those pot-house dramas
which, in spite of repeating continually the same sentimental motives,
always succeed in arousing the uncultivated sentiments of the masses.
The greatest art aims at representing tragic, refined and complex
conflicts of the human sexual sentiments and their irradiations, so as
to awaken emotion by causing vibrations in the deepest chords of the
human mind. Among poets and authors I may mention Shakespere,
Schiller, Goethe, de Musset, Heine, Gotthelf, and de Maupassant; among
musicians, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann, Loewe; among
painters, Titian, Murillo, Boecklin; and sculptors such as those of
the ancient Greeks or the modern French school.

Art and pure intellect do not form an antinomy; they are associated
together in the human mind as thought and sentiment, each preserving
its own, though relative, independence. Every artistic representation
requires an intellectual